In the Wee Small Hours
by titaniasfics
Summary: Katniss and Peeta run into each other while taking a walk in the "wee small hours." Either insomnia, or nightmares or both keep them from sleeping. Set between Games and the QuarterQuell. What happens when they run into each other? The song inspiration is Frank Sinatra's "In The Wee, Small Hours." Prompt by JamieSommers23


**Over the last almost year and a half that I've been writing fanfiction, I've had the amazing opportunity to meet writers who I had read and admired from afar and become friends with them. One of those, Jamiesommers23, has been so gentle and kind, not just with me, but with so many other writers. She allows me to follow her about like a mongrel :D. She was generous enough to assign to a group of us prompts to challenge us, prompts she would not have the time to write. I got the following one:**

"**In the Wee Small Hours"**

_Katniss and Peeta run into each other while taking a walk in the "wee small hours." Either insomnia, or nightmares or both keep them from sleeping. Set between Games/Quell. The song inspiration is Frank Sinatra's "In The Wee, Small Hours." What happens when they run into each other? Does their friendship start there?_

**This prompt was so much fun, it actually gave rise to two drabbles. The first one addresses the prompt as it should. The second one is a corruption of the prompt. They're short but I feel they need to go together, only because the same prompt gave rise to both but they are set in different times.**

**So, to Master J. Your humble Padawan offers this little trifle for your amusement.**

**XXXXX**

**In the Wee Small Hours**

_**In the wee small hours of the morning**_

_**While the whole wide world is fast asleep**_

_**You lie awake and think about the girl**_

_**And never, ever think of counting sheep**_

_**When your lonely heart has learned its lesson**_

_**You'd be hers if only she would call**_

_**In the wee small hours of the morning**_

_**That's the time you miss her most of all**_

_**-from **_**In the Wee Small Hours** _**by Frank Sinatra**_

Peeta tried not to trip as he walked along the darkened road from Victor's Village to the town center. It was well past midnight, though he couldn't say with certainty. He'd simply tumbled out of bed and shuffled into his shoes, glad to escape the latest round of nightmares, which had been vicious ever since the announcement of the Quarter Quell. He was sore, too, from the new exercise regimen he had imposed on himself, as well as Katniss and Haymitch. He had foolishly hoped that he would be too tired to dream during their "boot camp," as Haymitch had nicknamed it, but he should have known better.

Night cast a black shroud over the town, the lamps sporadically lit along the main thoroughfare, which was empty of travelers. Peeta didn't much mind it, though. It made him feel like the world was at peace and there was no one around except for him and the sing-song chirping of crickets drifting through the night air. He could momentarily forget that he would soon be forced to make the journey to the Capitol to participate in the Quarter Quell, either as tribute or mentor. It almost made him forget that Katniss would be entering the Arena again. The wee hours of the morning gave him a reprieve from the constant strategizing that dominated his mind every moment of the day, fixated on only one objective - to get Katniss out of that Arena alive. Again.

This special kind of peace soothed him and though he longed for a restful sleep, the silence of the slumbering District would have to do because what Peeta really wanted, or needed, to sleep well was outside of his reach. He knew if Katniss came to his bed, even for a few hours, he would sleep like a baby and his nightmares would recede to the background, in deference to the comfort that he only found in her arms.

He imagined her firm back pressed against his stomach as he curled himself around her like a warm blanket. It comforted her also - he could feel it in the way her body settled down against him, her small sigh of relief that she probably didn't realize she was making when their skin made contact through the material of their pajamas. But it was he who could feel all the awful events of his life slide away before the warmth of her small body in his arms. He ached for her to cure his insomnia and something even more acute - the unbearable isolation of being a Victor all alone.

Trees rustled overhead as a breeze ran through them. The Reaping always took place in mid-summer and the Games themselves served as the gruesome highlight of the season, at least for the Capitol. So the weather was wonderfully balmy tonight. He unconsciously wandered towards the Great Lawn that separated Victor's Village from District 12's town center. It was a small hillock covered in grass and the occasional wild flower that created a physical division between the Victor's part of town and the rest of District 12. Peeta was careful with his footing, considering his prosthetic and the intermittent stone that protruded from the otherwise smooth carpet of green.

As he reached the top of the slope, he was alerted by a sound far to his right. He squinted in the dim light, a smallish figure making her way in his direction. He thought he recognized the slender frame, worn leather jacket thrown over what appeared to be cotton pants and a t-shirt. The braid hanging over her shoulder was the final confirmation that it was Katniss climbing the hill.

She wore an expression of intense concentration, her scowl so deep, she appeared angry. The closer she came, the more he was sure she was wearing her pajamas and slippers, and the condition of her tousled hair indicated to him that she had just rolled out of bed. Peeta shifted his body towards her, the scraping of his shoes alerting her to his presence. She froze, a look of panic crossing her face and she instinctively crouched, as if preparing for a fight. The posture was so frighteningly like the one she had often assumed in the arena that he stepped forward, hands raised, to reassure her.

"It's me! Peeta!" he exclaimed hurriedly, watching with relief as she relaxed her stance and straightened from her semi-crouched position. Her grey eyes, still wide with fear, began to soften until they'd returned to their normal size.

"Peeta!" she gasped, fidgeting with her fingers. "I'm sorry. I thought, well, I thought…"

Peeta shook his head, walking towards her. "Don't worry. It happens to me too. I don't deal too well with surprises, either."

Katniss visibly relaxed, crossing the rest of the distance until she stood next to him. It was then that he saw the dark circles most prominently - how sunken her eyes looked in her head. They matched the bruise-colored half moons under his own eyes, and he had a sudden urge to drag her back home and tuck her into bed next to him. He'd get her to sleep - he knew just the way to stroke her hair to make her every defense and anxiety dissolve like hot wax in his hands.

He didn't say any of this, though. Instead, he faced out towards town from their vantage point on the hill, the sparse lights of the center twinkling like fireflies in the distance. Katniss stood close to him, quietly taking in the panorama with him. They didn't speak for a while. Finally, Katniss, in a voice still raspy from sleep, asked him, "Do you come out here a lot?"

Peeta shrugged. "Sometimes. When I want to think," he lied. They both knew they were out for the same reason.

She said nothing to this, continuing to stare out into the night. The wind picked up, carrying the fragrance, of Katniss or the woods, to his nose. His knees almost buckled from the intensity of the memory of waking to the smell of her surrounding him. If she had asked to lay down right there on the ground and sleep, he would have done it. She could have asked anything of him at that moment and he would have given it to her.

"Haymitch looked good today," she said suddenly, her voice only just quavering.

"He actually hit the side of the building, in the neighborhood of the target this time. I think his knife-throwing skills have taken a hit since he's taken up the bottle," Peeta quipped.

Katniss gave a small smile, nodding to herself. "Drinking that much can't be healthy."

"No, I'd think not," he replied. He glanced over at her and saw her shiver slightly.

Peeta battled with the thought that he could warm her up and make the cold go away. It would take nothing more than him reaching his arm out and pulling her close to him. The urge was so powerful, he had to check himself to be sure that he hadn't actually done it. However, when they had gotten back to 12, he had finally learned his lesson. It was something she simply didn't want from him. Instead of begging to let him warm her, which he might have even done if he thought he had a small chance of convincing her, he said simply, "You're cold. Let me walk you back home."

"It won't help!" she said suddenly, eyes gone wide and glassy. Peeta held her gaze, patiently waiting for her to say more, to ask – _if only she would call on me_.

But Katniss only shivered again, her eyes dropping to the ground and the opportunity blew away with the sudden biting wind. She simply turned around and moved in the direction of Victor's Village. They walked companionably down the now paved road, the statue of the winged woman greeting them at the entrance. Peeta walked Katniss to her door just as the sun was turning the horizon beyond trees the color of swirled purple, soon to be magenta, then pink. Peeta thought he might like to see it before trying his hand at baking this morning. Maybe tonight he'd be tired enough to finally fall into an undisturbed sleep.

Katniss paused at her threshold, looking over her shoulder at him, and he thought he caught a glimpse of something in her face – longing perhaps? But she dropped her gaze quickly and unlocked the door. Surely, it had been a figment of his desperate imagination. She pressed her way inside and turned fully to part from him.

"Thank you," she said quietly, lingering at the entrance. They stood in an awkward silence for several moments until Peeta couldn't stand it anymore. The whistle of the mines broke the trance that held them both in place. He could almost feel District 12 come to life like a giant, ancient creature roused from sleep, urging them on to their separate lives.

"Good night, Katniss," he said, stepping back down the stairs.

"Good night, Peeta," she responded as he walked back to his house across on the opposite side of the square. He felt her eyes on him, which made him feel even clumsier, as if she held him with an unseen rope that she refused to cut. When he entered the corridor of his home and turned again, he could just see her face fading from sight behind her own closing door, her grey eyes still locked on him until the handle clicked and her face finally disappeared in the shadows.

**XXXXXX**

**The Apple Tree**

Katniss lay under the old apple tree, grasping at the grass that grew throughout the pebbled ground of the bakery yard, which popped up in places through the blanket she lay on. The Mellark Family Bakery would have its grand re-opening within the month, and Peeta had insisted on rebuilding on the site that once housed the original establishment. It was more than sentimentality on Peeta's part - he wanted to preserve as much of his family's memory as possible. The new bakery was meant to give a sense of continuity, maybe even a kind of life to his family beyond the one that was stolen from them, the way it had been stolen from so many of those in District 12. It was his stab at immortality and goodness knows, Katniss could no more step between her husband and this project than she could stop an earthquake.

However, it was the apple tree that obsessed Katniss. Like Buttercup - it had managed to survive the bombing of District 12. True, it was bare and somewhat worse for the wear than when she'd first collapsed beneath it so many years ago. But it still gave some shade, even if it was only now, two years after the eradication of 12, that the tree was finally producing leaves again.

She closed her eyes, soaking in the heat of the setting spring sun while the breeze whispered in her ears. District 12's topography was a strange one - though they were in the center, the rocky ground did not permit the symmetrical and elegant squares of the Capitol's city blocks and buildings. Here, the town center was circumnavigated by stubborn hills and ravines, upended tree trunks and thick, green bushes spilling down from the mountainside. Katniss lay without fear of discovery because she knew that it would take an intrepid soul to mount the small hillock behind the former pig pen to catch sight of her laying like a rag doll under the scraggly branches. And there were so few souls right now in District 12, anyway.

With her eyes resting shut, she caught the sound of a bumble bee whirling by in its search for an open pistil to rest on while feeding on the sugary nectar of a flower. It was a sweet image of the fuzzy, yellow and black creature taking its fill of the flower's frothy delight, and for some reason, this made Katniss indescribably happy. She trained her ears on a shuffling sound of footsteps from the direction of the bakery and would have leapt up in embarrassment had the cadence of Peeta's step not been so thoroughly and completely his.

When she opened her eyes, he was kneeling beside her, his head blocking the last embers of sunset, his curls diffusing the light like a warm halo. He had a half smile on his full lips, no doubt because of the strangeness of finding her prone on the rocky ground.

"I'm assuming by the look of total relaxation, that you didn't fall down and hurt yourself," Peeta asked, suppressing a laugh.

"You're right," Katniss said in a rare display of jocularity. "I am lying here because I want to. There's more blanket if you care to join me."

Chuckling to himself, he hunkered down next to her until he was laying on his back, staring up at the darkening night sky. The inky blackness spread behind the receding sun, leaving the silence of a quieting town and the two of them lost in their respective thoughts.

"This tree has been in my family since before I was born," Peeta said quietly after a long while. The stars twinkled between the sparse leaves of the branches struggling to flower. "When I was small, I spent all winter looking for the apple blossoms to appear. When they finally bloomed, I knew winter was over and spring had arrived." He turned his head to glance at Katniss' small but strong profile. "Everything was always a little better in spring."

Katniss' mind flew automatically to the forest, the brisk, clear morning air, the light streaming with its own special glow through the canopy of trees. The woods teamed with animals emerging from their long winter's sleep. The easy hunting meant her family could eat well again, as good as a person could eat in the District 12 of the past. There were furs to sell and squirrels to trade. Spring brought food. And food was life in a place where it was always in short supply.

"The best hunting is in springtime," Katniss said. "I hunted as much as I could so I could trade and stock for the winters because things were always so scarce then." She remembered the fur she sold in the Hob, the curing of meat, the drying of whatever wild herbs or fruit she found in the forest. She worked herself to the bone to make sure that her sister and mother didn't starve in winter. The thought of Prim pulled at the pit of her stomach and Katniss felt she had to look away from the pink and white blossoms hovering over her to regain her suddenly fading composure.

Peeta spoke, pulling her back from her descent into sadness. "I know what you mean. I hardly ever saw you in winter. But when the little pink and white flowers sprouted on this tree, I knew the season of you was returning again." Katniss turned her head towards him at his confession. "I loved spring because it brought apple blossoms to this tree and you to the back door of the bakery."

"Peeta…" she said, the swooping feeling of grief lifting at the upteenth evidence of his love for her.

When he spoke again, it was with a voice full of feeling. "You don't know what it means to me to re-open this bakery at this time of the year, with you as my wife. It brings together everything that was ever good in my life." He turned his head and his impossibly blue eyes fell on her, the only light she could see in a world where the sun had sunk down below the horizon, leaving long fingers of gold and violet to pull the cover of night over their heads. "It means everything to me." He looked back up at the branches as Katniss' hand snakes across the duvet to close the space between them, her fingers twining together with his.

"This is where it all started," she said, remembering how hard she shivered under that very same tree when she was eleven years old, the very same tree that witnessed a young Peeta tossing bread to a girl he'd known only from afar. She was in awe of all the accidents and travails that had carried them from the poorest corner of the earth, through all the Districts of Panem, to the Capitol itself, before winding through the treacherous hell of two arenas, and back to their crushed home again. She marveled at the mystery of how they'd both managed to return to both themselves and each other. "It ends at the beginning."

Peeta shook his head with a happy, wide grin that infected Katniss with its secret joy. "Uh-uh, Katniss Mellark." He rolled onto his side, his hand gripping her waist and pulling her roughly towards him, his good leg pinning hers, the gleam in his eye twinkling with more than just humor. "It's not the end yet. We're only just getting started."


End file.
